Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out Page 14

  The Discipline of Marijuana

  Marijuana requires extensive training. You don’t get the automatic chemical hit from grass. The marijuana high involves a subtle interplay between the turned-on sense organ and the external stimuli that bombard it. To learn how to use marijuana, you have to learn to use your sense organs. To listen to music behind grass, you have to log as much training time as would be required to understand and build a hi-fi audio system.

  Few nonsmokers understand the sensory training necessary to groove with grass.

  For the average adult, sense organs are game-playing cameras to pick up the cues of the game—red or black pieces on the checkerboard. The eye is clearly made to read the newspaper and the ear is clearly made to listen to the telephone. The atrophied sense of taste is connected with the fueling process of the robot. The body itself is a machine to move you through the sequence of chess game movements that make up your symbolic day.

  The neurological fact of the matter is that the eye is a multi-layered swamp of millions, hundreds of millions, of rods and cones, each one of which is equipped to receive light waves and to fire off an orgiastic belt when it gets hit by a light wave. You never see any “thing” or any object. From the standpoint of your retina there is just light bouncing off my face, off the microphone, off the blackboard. Light! Light, hurtling into the retina of your eye, the soft naked swamp of rods and cones, at the speed of 186,000 miles a second! Wow!

  That’s why artists enjoy using cannabis. Because they are not just seeing things. They are aware of and alert to this play of light. One of the first reactions to the psychedelic experience is, “Why, colors are so bright! The world seems alive! I’m seeing for the first time! It’s alive! It’s alive!” Well, of course it’s alive! Your eye knew that all along. It’s alive because it’s nothing but pure light energy smashing into your retina. And those of you who have seen a psychedelic light show have some idea of what the psychedelic visual experience is. It’s not just a sequence of tidy symbols one after another but an inundation, a Niagara of light energy.

  There is no optical instrument that man will ever make that is so delicate and intricate as the retina of the eye. And the challenge is, can you learn how to use it? The same thing is true of the ear. The same thing is true of all the sense organs. The human body, as a matter of fact, is a collection of billions and billions of cameras, all ready to be focused, all ready to be turned on, to be harmonized and symphonized by the skillful user of this machine. I am convinced that very few people in the United States know how to use marijuana.

  The use of the senses or the enhancement of the senses comes as a shock in our puritan American culture. We are a prudish people. It may surprise many Americans to learn that sensual training has for many thousands of years been a key spiritual technique in almost every religion in the world. If it sounds strange to you that the road to God comes through the senses, think about the Gothic cathedral. Consider the sequence of behavior that the medieval person went through when he walked in a Gothic cathedral, that glorious instrument for turning on. First he centered his eye on that rose window, a mandala. Then the incense began exploding like grenades in the olfactory bulbs in his nose with that one key message—it’s not food, boy, it’s not business, this is incense, the smell of God. The arrangement of the posture of the body, the mudra, the genuflection, or gesture of prayer, is a kinesthetic sign that you are centering your sensual energies to look within. The Gregorian chant, like the classic religious music of India and Persia, gets that drone going to remind you that this is a nongame process. That you are going within. If it seems surprising to you that marijuana can be considered as a key to the spiritual experience, don’t forget that there are 200 million people in the world today who use marijuana regularly in their spiritual life or in their pursuit of serenity.

  In terms of the optical metaphor, marijuana is the corrective lens which returns vision to sharp, clear focus.

  The Discipline of Somatic Ecstasy

  As one moves up the psychochemical continuum away from narcosis, more training is required. Thus the drugs which turn on the somatic level of consciousness (level 3) demand more psychedelic work than marijuana (level 4).

  Hashish, MDA, moderate doses of mescaline and psilocybin open awareness to messages from the autonomic nervous system, signals from the great organs and tissue centers within the body.

  The average Westerner is aware only of the grossest emergency messages from within. Hunger! Pain! Suffocation! And Western psychology is equally ignorant of the long tradition of empirical investigations of psychedelic somatics by oriental psychologists. Tantric scholars (Hindu and Buddhist) have been describing and mapping somatic sensations for thousands of years. Elaborate and highly sophisticated manuals teach the science of somatic ecstasy. Tantrics call the centers of bodily consciousness cakras. The student is taught methods for turning on to this level of consciousness and systematic languages of color, sound, posture and symbol to communicate his observations.

  Modern neurology confirms the psychedelic scientific explorations of the Tantrics. The brain, through the mediation of the autonomic nervous system, is in constant communication with somatic events. Your brain receives second-to-second teletype messages from your respiratory and circulatory systems. It is ironic that we seem to require the external probing of physicians to guess at diagnoses which are already coded by our own brains.

  It is quite possible that within a decade, turned-on doctors will be giving level 3 psychedelics (like hashish) to patients, who will then be taught how to diagnose their own somatic ailments.

  The Highest Kick Requires the Most Work

  The sensory level of consciousness is limited to the few sense organs by means of which man makes his fumbling contact with the external world. The somatic level of consciousness is limited to the organs and tissue centers of the body.

  The cellular level of consciousness puts man in touch with the DNA chain, which goes back to the origins of life. It is possible for man to tap into the unbroken wire of evolution, to decode fragments of the coiling blueprint. Most people who have taken large doses of mescaline or moderate amounts of LSD have clicked into the reincarnation line. The response to this experience is usually awed reverence, expressed in vague and corny religious mottoes. “We are all one!” “We are all leaves on the tree of life!”

  Few hippies have understood the genetic implications of this experience and have realized that a new science of internal paleontology, ecstatic archaeology, has begun.

  When I hear worried speculations about how man will use his leisure time in the automation age, I fail to alarm. The retracing of genetic memories back down through the myriad, multi-webbed fabric of RNA-DNA memories will be the major intellectual-ecstatic task of the future. The time will come within a century when an educated man will be he who knows who he is and where he comes from. Knows on the basis of direct psychedelic experience.

  The level 2 psychedelic chemicals are the microscopes of internal biology.

  The use of level 1 drugs—LSD and STP—involves the knowledge of the advanced nuclear physicist. While almost everyone who ingests 500 gamma of LSD gets the solar vision, there is probably only one person in a thousand with the diligence and courage to understand and control the internal nuclear fission released by this miraculous chemical. LSD is the elecron microscope of psychology.

  The “My God Is Better Than Your God” Game

  One of the vexing social problems in the expansion and exploration of consciousness is this: everyone has his favorite level of consciousness. One naturally locates God and all virtue in one’s own favorite level of consciousness. The junkie does it at the level of complete void. The symbol-addictive person locates God and the meaning of everything in the center of his mental chessboard.

  Many religions have been founded on revelations from the sensory level of consciousness. Certain forms of Zen, the Hindu and Tibetan Tantra, early Christianity, frankly and studiously used the sens
es to find inner meaning and divinity. And most of these God seekers criticize, condemn, and imprison those who do not follow their favored turn-on method.

  The classic Buddhist, of course, says frankly and straight off that he is not interested in the senses, that he is not interested in the symbol game, that he is not interested in the cellular transformations of the DNA code and that long, repetitious spinning out of bodies. He wants to get off the wheel of life. The goal of the Buddhist is the white light of the void, level 1, the silent prelife, preorganic off.

  The “White Light of the Void” Game

  One time we were running a training center in Mexico. That year we were using a Buddhist text, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, as our psychedelic map. The aim of the game was to move from stupor to symbol to sense to cell and finally to arrive at home base, the white light of the void. So we proceeded to do as human beings always do; we set up a hierarchical game. All sorts of invidious, competitive distinctions developed. “Well, I was in the white light 3 hours in my session last night.” “Oh, you didn’t make it at all?”

  We are a species endowed and equipped with incredibly soft machinery which has taken the DNA code 2 billion years to develop, and we live on a planet with an enormous range of energies, light, sound, chemical, around us. The aim of human education, it seems to me, is to learn how to use all of these levels of consciousness, just as the person skilled in optics is able to shift focus from the dark glasses to the cellular microscope to the electron microscope, which reduces everything to a dancing mosaic of vibrations, and then slip on his corrective lenses to drive home.

  Be very careful about locating good or God, right or wrong, legal or illegal, at your favorite level of consciousness.

  The Politics of Ecstasy

  This mention of good, right, and legal brings me to the final part of my essay, the politics of ecstasy.

  To understand the current controversy over LSD and marijuana, I think you have to realize that we are right in the middle of that most amazing social phenomenon, a religious renaissance. The LSD experience is, and the marijuana experience can be, a deeply spiritual event. The LSD kick is a spiritual ecstasy. The LSD trip is a religious pilgrimage. The LSD gamble is that risk that men have faced for thousands of years if they wished to pursue what lay beyond their minds. The LSD psychosis is a religious confusion, an ontological confusion, a spiritual crisis. What is real? Who am I? Where do I belong? What’s the real level of energy? Can I go back? Should I go back? Should I go on? How many of you can answer those questions?

  When you hear about or read about a lurid account of an LSD psychosis, keep this hypothesis in mind. It may be pathology, but it might be divine madness.

  Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

  My advice to people in America today is as follows: If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in and drop out.

  Turning On

  By “turn on” I mean get in touch, first of all, with your sense organs (not as instruments to be used in some secular game, but as cameras to put you in touch with the vibrant energies around you). Get in touch with your cellular wisdom. Get in touch with the universe within. The only way out is in. And the way to find the wisdom within is to turn on.

  Now turning on is not an easy thing to do. In the first place, it takes courage to go out beyond your mind. The psychedelic yoga is the toughest, most demanding yoga of all. The easy thing to do is to stay with your addiction, stay with the symbol system you have. As you expand your symbol system from year to year by building up a few conditioned reflexes, you learn a few new words, a few new techniques each year. You will say, “Well, I’m growing. I’m learning.” But you are still caught in symbols. The psychedelic road to divinity is neither a royal nor an easy one. As I said earlier, to learn how to use your sense organs with the help of marijuana is a very exacting discipline. The discipline of LSD is without doubt the most complex and demanding task that man on this planet has yet confronted. I often tell college students, “If you want to get a Ph.D., count on 4 years after you graduate. If you want to get an M.D., count on 6 or 8 after your A.B. But for your LSD, count on 30 years at least.”

  Tuning In

  By “tune in” I mean harness your internal revelations to the external world around you. I am not suggesting that we all find a desert island and curl up under a palm tree and take LSD and study our navels. As I look around at the people who have taken LSD, far from being inactive, lazy and passive, I see them in every walk of life and in every age group, struggling to express what they are learning. The hippy movement, the psychedelic style, involves a revolution in our concepts of art and creativity which is occurring right before our eyes. The new music, the new poetry, the new visual art, the new film.

  Dropping Out

  “Dropping out” is the toughest pill to swallow. Whenever I give a lecture and tell people to drop out, invariably I alarm many listeners, including my friends, who say, “Now listen, Timothy, tone it down. You can’t go around telling students to drop out of school, telling middle-class men with mortgage payments to drop out of their jobs. That’s just too much! You can’t do that in a technological society like this!” Of course, this message, turn on, tune in and drop out, just happens to be the oldest message around—the old refrain that has been passed on for thousands of years by every person who has studied the energy process and man’s place in it. Find the wisdom within, hook it up in a new way, but above all, detach yourself. Unhook the ambitions and the symbolic drives and the mental connections which keep you addicted and tied to the immediate tribal game.

  Is our American society so insecure that it cannot tolerate our young people taking a year or two off, growing beards, wandering around the country, fooling with new forms of consciousness? This is one of the oldest traditions in civilized society. Take a voyage! Take the adventure! Before you settle down to the tribal game, try out self-exile. Your coming back will be much enriched.

  The Psychedelic Migration

  Today we face a problem which is unique in man’s history. Due to the population explosion, there is no place for people like us to go. During the summer of 1963 a group of us were deported from 3 countries to which we had gone to find a quiet place where we could teach ourselves and a small group of other people how to use our nervous systems. We made no demands on these countries. We actually brought money into these shaky economies, but we were barred. So as we looked around this planet, pored over maps and atlases that summer, it dawned on us that today, for the first time in human history, there was no place for people like us to go.

  A hundred years ago, people who believed as we do in the spiritual life would get into covered wagons and move across the prairie. The Mormons did it. Or 300 years ago, people like us got into leaky boats and sailed for Plymouth Rock. And the fact of the matter is, there are many more people today who wish to follow a psychedelic way of life than there were Puritans in England who colonized this country. There are probably more in the city of San Francisco.

  External migration as a way of finding a place where you can drop out and turn on and then tune in to the environment is no longer possible. The only place to go is in. And that’s the fascinating thing about this new and indigenous religious movement which is springing up in this country today. It is interesting, too, that the psychedelic religious movement uses the same chemical aids or sacraments as the first American religion—the peyote religion of the native American Indians. I wonder if this is an accident or rather, perhaps, a curious game of the DNA code.

  The characteristics of the psychedelic-spiritual quest are these: it’s highly individual, highly personal. You will find no temples, you will find no organized dogmas; you will find instead small groups of people, usually centered on families, making these voyages together. We have discovered, as men have discovered for thousands of years, that the only temple is the human b
ody and the place of worship is the shrine within your own home, prepared and lovingly designed for your spiritual procedure. The growth of LSD use in this country in the last few years is, if I dare say so, a minor miracle in itself. It has grown without any institutional backing or even recognition or approval. For the first 3 or 4 years it grew silently, person by person, cell by cell, husband and wife, you and your friends. My cells tell me that that’s how everything durable grows. That’s how it’s always been.

  When I say that the LSD movement is highly individual, I do not want you to think that I am talking about individuality in the personality sense. John Doe. Or Timothy Leary. I am saying rather that it’s all located inside.

  My Nervous System and Yours Is the Hinge of Evolution

  From the genetic point of view, your nervous system and my nervous system is a hinge, a curious cellular hinge on which all of evolutionary history pivots. The cosmic Fox Movietone newsreel camera. Turn your nervous system on and focus it outside and you’re tuning in on all sorts of messages and energy constellations that are out there, here and now. But if you focus your nervous system within, you will decode the cellular script and discover that the entire string of evolution on this planet is writ in protein molecules inside the nucleus of every cell in your body.

  Be God and the Universe

  Now here is the challenge. And it’s the toughest and the most exciting challenge that I can think of. It is possible for you (in a way, you might say it is your duty) to recapitulate personally the entire evolutionary sequence. In other words, you can flash through the whole cycle yourself because the whole thing is buried inside your body.